Editor’s Note: The remarkably biased U.S. reporting on Iran’s election a year ago – portraying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory as “fraudulent” despite strong evidence to the contrary – has laid the groundwork for a new Middle East conflict, much as bogus reporting on Iraq’s WMD did in 2002-03.

Washington’s conventional wisdom has now wrapped itself into the logical pretzel of backing a “democracy movement” whose goal is to overturn the democratic judgment of a foreign people, as Edward S. Herman and David Peterson report in this guest essay:

It is almost a commonplace that the flow of information, opinion, and moral indignation in the United States adapts well to the demands of state policy.

If the state is hostile to Iran, even openly trying to engage in "regime change," and if it is supportive of the state of Israel, no matter what crimes Israel may commit, and if it doesn't like the populist president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and supports his overthrow and a follow-up "demonstration election" by the local elite, the media and many intellectuals will follow the state agenda, even if they must indulge in mental somersaults.

In the case of Iran, the Israeli state and its U.S. supporters are also eager for regime change, so the somersaults on the Iran menace are wilder yet.

This attitude was in full bloom in a full-page ad in the Feb. 7 New York Times and Feb. 9 International Herald Tribune addressed to Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Dimitry Medvedev, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel: "How Long Can We Stand Idly By and Watch This Scandal in Iran Unfold?"[1] The ad was sponsored by "The Elie Wiesel Foundation For Humanity," and signed by 44 Nobel Prize laureates.

The ad attacks Iran's "cruel and oppressive regime" for its "shameless war against its own people" and its "irresponsible and senseless nuclear ambitions [that] threaten the entire world," and calls upon Washington, Paris, Moscow, London, and Berlin, the UN Security Council, and "important NGOs" to impose “harsher sanctions” on Iran, and adopt "concrete measures...to protect this new nation of dissidents….

"They must know that we are on their side," the ad implores. "All of us who care must offer our full support and solidarity to the brave people of Iran."

This open letter is a shameless and demagogic call for foreign intervention in Iran, for destabilization and subversion, and, above all, for war — although three of the signers (including Wiesel) are past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize,[2] and the text could have been written by the Foreign Office of the state of Israel.

Indeed, Wiesel himself is an unabashed protagonist for Israel, having long proclaimed his unwillingness to make a public criticism of that country ("I never attack, never criticize Israel when I am not in Israel"[3]), so that we can rest assured that his "Foundation for Humanity" will never proclaim its solidarity with any humans living under the Israeli boot.

The Wiesel Foundation did not sponsor a full-page ad in the New York Times to protest Israel's shameless and criminal onslaught against the Gaza Palestinians in early 2009, which in just three weeks killed some 340 children, a greater number than the aggregate of protester deaths in post-election Iran.[4]

Nor will it sponsor an ad that criticizes the irresponsible buildup of nuclear weapons that Israel has accomplished outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that pose a much clearer threat to the world than that posed by the still nuclear-weapon-free Iran, which is under steady threat of attack by Israel and by a U.S. leadership that says "all options" remain on the table.

That Wiesel and his "Foundation for Humanity" could get 43 other Nobel laureates to sign this hysterical, hypocritical, and morally degraded war-call is a sad indication of the state of the reigning Western intellectual culture in 2010.

This ad also raises once again the important question of what the people of Iran really want.

In the ad, and in much of the Western commentary on Iran's June 12, 2009, presidential election and the many large street demonstrations that have followed it, the protesters (the "brave people") are assumed to represent the demands of the majority of Iran's 70 million people, as well as a revolutionary "Green Movement" sweeping across Iran's national life and shaking the Islamic Republic to its very foundations.[5]

The June 2009 election was declared a massive fraud in the establishment Western media and even on the liberal-left, with many alleging that Iran's ruling elite had deprived Mir Hossein Mousavi of his rightful victory, and awarded it to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by electoral-numbers manipulation.

"There is no transparency or accountability in Iran, so we may never know for sure what happened in the presidential election last week," the New York Times asserted in its first post-election editorial. "But given the government's even more than usually thuggish reaction, it certainly looks like fraud."[6]

The Chatham House study's co-author Ali Ansari told the New York Times "I don't think they actually counted the votes, though that's hard to prove."[9]

Segments of the left were even more extreme in their commitment to the stolen-election line. The U.S.-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy issued a statement in early July (which the CPD also used as part of a fundraising campaign) that claimed that "there is very powerful evidence that either no one emerged with a majority [in the first round of the election], or that Mousavi won outright."[10]

The problem with writing-off the official results of Iran's 2009 election as a fraud or as a stolen election is that both the 2005 presidential election results and a string of opinion polls carried out before and after the 2009 election suggest quite strongly that Ahmadinejad does in fact enjoy majority support among Iranians, and very well could have won outright.

Thus in the June 24, 2005, presidential runoff between Ahmadinejad and the former Iranian President Ayatollah Ali Akbar Rafsanjani (1989-1997), Ahmadinejad won by roughly a 2-to-1 margin, receiving 62 percent of the vote, compared to Rafsanjani's 32 percent [11] At the time, no one seriously contended that this result was based on electoral fraud.[12]

Then, during the run-up to the 2009 election, an opinion poll completed by three U.S. groups just three weeks before the vote found that for those Iranians willing to commit themselves, Ahmadinejad would beat Mousavi by better than a 2-to-1 margin (34 percent - 14 percent),[13] a slightly higher ratio of victory than the official election results as reported by the Interior Ministry on June 13 (63 percent - 34 percent).[14]

Ever since Ahmadinejad's first-round victory was announced, those claiming fraud have argued that this pre-election poll by the U.S. groups was conducted too early, so that it failed to take into account the effects of the televised presidential debates in early June, an energetic campaign by Mousavi, and a surge of anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment among Iran's younger voters and its largely youth-based protest movement.

But beyond the lack of strong evidence for these claims, two post-election surveys by the University of Tehran, a third by the Canadian GlobeScan firm, and a fourth jointly by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and WorldPublicOpinion.org, have asked Iranian respondents whom they had actually voted for.[15]

Significantly, each of these four surveys found that Ahmadinejad received more than half of the ballots cast (from 55 percent cent to 66 percent), with Mousavi under one-third (from 14 percent to 32 percent).

In the most careful of these surveys, carried out by PIPA - WPO.org from Aug. 27 through Sept. 10, 2009, researchers asked this additional question: "If the same election were to be repeated tomorrow, who would you vote for?" This time, 49 percent of the respondents named Ahmadinejad, compared to only eight percent Mousavi.[20]

Notice that in contrast to how the beliefs and attitudes of Iran's 70 million citizens tend to be depicted in the establishment Western media, with their saturation focus on "opposition" street demonstrators and repression by the Iranian state, none of the responses to these (and many other) questions suggest a badly delegitimized government in the eyes of Iran's citizens.

As we wrote last October, the "combined results of the Terror Free Tomorrow poll in May, Iran's official election results in June, and the results of the PIPA-WPO poll in September, clearly reinforce each other, just as they reinforce the conclusion that Ahmadinejad was the actual winner in Iran's 2009 presidential election, independently of whether some vote fraud did occur."[21]

Indeed, PIPA now draws the same conclusion: That "even if some fraud did occur, it is not clear that the outcome would have been fundamentally different."[22]

Nor is it clear that in terms of violating the basic democratic rights of its citizens, Iran's 2009 presidential election was worse than U.S. presidential elections have been for many years.

In 2000, for example, would the official result have been the same in the United States in the absence of the racial gerrymandering caused by felony-disenfranchisement laws[23] and, ultimately, the fiat of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which ordered a stay of the vote recount in Florida that had been permitted by the Florida Supreme Court and was then underway, on grounds that this recount "threaten[ed] irreparable harm to petitioner [George Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election"?[24]

The late June 2009 Chatham House analysis, which cast doubts on Iran's official election result and thus helped to delegitimize the Iranian government in the eyes of the great Western metropolitan centers, was quoted frequently in the Western media, and its authors were sometimes used as expert sources.

But the original September 2009 survey of Iranian opinion by PIPA - WPO.org was virtually ignored by the Western media; and PIPA's subsequent analysis of no fewer than 12 different opinion surveys, released on Feb. 3, remained unreported anywhere in the establishment media through Feb. 17.[25]

We believe that this differential treatment follows from the now well-established party-line in the West that has demonized Iran's leaders, and that processes and manages news-interest and news-flow accordingly.

The Western media and intellectuals gravitated to Chatham House's analysis while ignoring PIPA's for the simple reason that Chatham House (like so many other commentators) served-up the requisite damning view of the official result — and PIPA did not. Hence, the newsworthiness of the "stolen election" line, and the lack of attention paid to serious empirical challenges to it.

Overall, the 12 opinion surveys analyzed by PIPA do show that as levels of education, Internet use, reliance on non-Iranian media for news, and the youthfulness of respondents increases, so did support for Mousavi, just as Mousavi retained an edge over Ahmadinejad in Tehran City and even Tehran Province.[26]

Nevertheless, these clear trends were not sufficient to produce majorities in favor of Mousavi (even in Tehran City), Iran's non-Internet-using and rural voting populations are larger in number, and Ahmadinejad has apparently enjoyed majority support among all age groups (even youth), among women as well as men (though less among men than women), among urban as well as rural voters (though less among the urban than the rural), and among the two largest ethnic minorities (the Azeris and Turkmen).[27]

As we have noted, opinion surveys both before and after the election gave Ahmadinejad these same majorities, and all of them are consistent with the official result.

Ahmadinejad's 2-to-1 victory over Rafsanjani in 2005 surprised many foreign pundits, but it was not met by street demonstrations inside Iran. Four years later, however, his 2-to-1 victory over Mousavi was met instantly by the most massive and sustained demonstrations since 1979, with shows of support staged in many other countries as well, and lesser demonstration continuing into this year.

This undoubtedly shows significant opposition within Iran to the ruling regime, even though the June 12 vote and multiple opinion surveys raise questions about the nature and depth of this opposition.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that economic sanctions, U.S. and NATO-bloc wars in countries to Iran's east and west, ongoing U.S. and Israeli military threats against Iran, and foreign-organized terrorism and subversion inside Iran, all have proven costly and painful to Iran's citizens, and had feedback effects on their attitudes towards their government (as was true in Nicaragua while it was under attack by the United States during the Sandinista years, 1979-1990).

There have also been significant Western (though mainly U.S.) attempts to "educate" Iranians, including programs that subsidize dissent and "democracy promotion." The so-called "Green Movement" is particularly notable for its links to foreign support groups and media, and its high degree of orientation towards Western audiences.

The "Green Movement" is well-geared to the regime-change program of Western powers, even though PIPA-WPO.org found that "there are far more similarities than differences between Mousavi supporters' worldview and that of Iranians at large," and on questions pertaining to Iran's nuclear program, the "general public was statistically the same as Mousavi supporters," with virtually the same percentages wanting Iran to pursue only nuclear power (55 percent – 57 percent), a nuclear weapons program as well as nuclear power (37 percent – 38 percent), and no nuclear program of any kind at all (3 percent – 6 percent).[28]

By now, the standard claims about Iran's "stolen election" have been repeated so many times by the establishment Western media, as well as by those on the left who took the bait, that almost everybody is hooked on it and unable to wiggle free.[29]

Undoubtedly, many foreign activists sincerely believe that they are supporting democracy inside Iran, and large numbers of Iranian dissidents truly are struggling for a more open and decent society and political order.

But if Iran's 2009 official election result is valid, and if there is strong majority support among Iran's citizens for the structure and general character of its Islamic Republic,[30] then these foreign activists, including the collection of Nobel laureates gathered around Wiesel, and those on the left who like to invoke "solidarity with the anti-Ahmadinejad movement," clearly are not aligned with majority opinion inside Iran.

We are not quite sure what to call this toxic mix of opposing the majority will of a foreign country's citizens and doing so in the name of "democracy," while feeding into the regime-change program of the United States and Israel. But strong currents of Orientalism as well as imperialism are clearly running through it.

The huge attention given to Iran's 2009 election and its aftermath,[31] and the indignation vented over its "stolen" character, can only be explained by the convergence between this focus and the long-term U.S.-Israeli hostility towards Iran — their demonization of the leaders of the Islamic Republic, and their steady efforts to destabilize Iran and force it to change in a manner to their liking.

It is also of interest that less democratic elections in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the August and October 2009 "demonstration elections" in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan, and even the coup in Honduras in late June and the subsequent terror-laced "demonstration election" there in late November, were treated in the West with nowhere near the same level of attention or indignation.

The focus on Iran is thus a remarkable case of channeled benevolence, but one that, from the standpoint of genuine peace and democracy-promotion objectives, we believe to be seriously mis-channeled.

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